You remember George Carlins 7 words you can’t say on TV. People are asked to apologize, companies fined, for even the most incidental, benign use of them. But faggot, kike, dyke, freak, nigger, towelhead, bitch, loser, fat ass, pig, dork, retard, stupid, dickhead, and dozens of other hateful things (click below)

that people call each other are not considered profanity, and are regularly tolerated in public, the radio, television – even from the mouths of children, where they are dismissed as mere immaturity – when in fact, such taunts and even silent harmful intent have ultimately proven to result in homicide, and suicide. Remember Columbine?

If you’ve clicked the link above, you’ve seen a man, an officer of the law, being abusive without ever using profanity. Consider the way some propose fixing the drug problem: rehabilitate or decriminalize the users and kill the value of the drugs, making them pedestrian.

If people weren’t offended by “cunt” and instead accepted it as a valuable part of our language and laughed at those who attempted to use it otherwise hateful ways, we’d liquidate its profane prestige. Some people might have seen the word in the title of this post and found it distasteful. I’m not crazy about “fag”, and I am one. However, neither word is really that offensive, and even my reaction to them is proof that I still have programming attached to the words.

“Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind,
they can change our world.” – Buddha

Perhaps we should spend as much time training kids that “four letter words” without harmful intent are unloaded guns, trappings of our culture, harmless and meaningless in the absence of malice. We’d wind up with a kinder society less hung up on simple sequences of letters, and time wasted on apologies. In time, we might even reclaim these words and re-brand them like Eve Ensler honorably seeks to do, and breed out the hateful contexts of the words, in the same way genetic flaws are bred out of livestock, transforming them into useless relics from an ignorant past.

I agree. the words are all in how you use them. The best word in the world can be used to hurt and degrade someone else. Eve Ensler’s work is still relevant and still necessary! I was in VM last year and it was a wonderful experience. I wrote about it on V-Day– you’re welcome to take a look!